Datalogix IPO; Publisher Programmatic Skepticism

Datalogix may be gearing up for an IPO later this year after well-publicized deals that enable targeting with Facebook (see this 2013 AdExchanger article and UK announcement last week) and Salesforce (April). The WSJ reports, “An IPO would be a good test of investors’ enthusiasm for two of the hottest thematic buckets over the past couple years: ‘ad tech’ and ‘big data.’ Both have produced scores of offerings since 2012, though more recently the sub-sectors have been hit hard by the correction in high-growth tech stocks." Read more.

Shoddy Programmatic

Publisher skepticism about programmatic media remains a strong theme. Australia’s AdNews reports that Bauer Media Group sales exec Tony Kendall was none too pleased with programmatic momentum from his sell-side POV. Speaking at a media summit in Sydney last week, AdNews quotes Kendall as saying, “Publishers spend an enormous amount of money creating content and marketing to get eyeballs to view that content and the programmatic guys, all they do is aggregate the hard work everyone else does and earn on it on the way through. I think that’s quite sh*tty in the scheme of things.” Read it.

Watching Brand Data

Brandwatch is in the business of monitoring and analyzing conversations across social media platform – and that translates into the funnelling of marketing spend over the long haul. The company announced that it raised $22 million in funding on Friday, VentureBeat reports. The company was founded seven years ago, and Verizon, Pepsi and Whole Foods are among its clients. Brandwatch CEO Giles Palmer offers what he says helps differentiate his company: “We crawl and store the data ourselves, which, when coupled with our large, dedicated development resource, allows us to be agile in responding to any changes in the marketplace.” Read more.

Mobilizing Verizon

Last Friday, The Wall Street Journal’s Jack Marshall looked more deeply at Verizon’s ad initiative known as Precision Market Insights. Marshall explains how the company thinks it has a way around the mobile cookie problem “by assigning unique identifiers to its subscribers. Through a product called PrecisionID, Verizon will pass these identifiers to advertisers when mobile users in its network load websites and apps, in order to help advertisers target messages to those users. Verizon says it doesn’t collect any information itself, and that the identifiers are anonymous.” Read more.

Targeting Local

StreetFight reports on a presentation by Facebook’s Justin Moore, an engineering manager, who discussed local data initiatives for the Web giant. “Moore, a former Foursquare engineer who joined Facebook in early 2012, says a team in the company’s New York office has spent the past two years turning the 32 billion pieces of location-tagged content, which have been created on the social network, into a sprawling database of places that spans the globe.” Target more.

Fraud Fight

The FT’s Robert Cookson reports that in a 365,000-impression sample (a $3 eCPM would make this about a $1,000 buy) from a Mercedes Benz campaign run by Rocket Fuel, anti-fraud tech firm Telemetry says that it detected more than half of the impressions were created by bots. Nevertheless, the FT reports, “Mercedes said that over the whole of its campaign, the proportion of questionable impressions was less than 6 per cent, and that Rocket Fuel ‘refunded us for the suspect impressions’. The carmaker added that it and its US advertising agency, Merkley & Partners, which is part of Omnicom Group, have continued to work with Rocket Fuel.” Read more (subscription). The FT quotes Rocket Fuel, which said in February that “it rejected 500 billion bid requests from online publishers because of inventory quality concerns.”

Facebook Fraud

Calling him the advertising equivalent of the Wolf of Wall Street, the NY Post reported last week that a lawsuit has been brought against a former Facebook advertiser. The Post reports, “Sports-car-loving Martin Grunin – who told his St. Francis College student paper last year, ‘Money drives me completely’ – convinced Facebook reps to open advertising accounts with high limits for him, according to the federal suit filed Wednesday. He then flipped the social network’s ad space for hundreds of thousands of dollars while Facebook didn’t see a dime, according to the suit, filed in San Francisco.” Read it.